Caribou Trip

 
 On the Mountains

I took a ride with Mike towards the Kivalina trail shelter cabin. We were heading out in search of the caribou that were moving through the area. Its about 20 miles from town.

There still is hardly any snow here so the trail was pretty rough. I had a hard time keeping up on my machine. After bouncing along for about an hour I pulled over a small rise where Mike was waiting for me.  My back was soaked in sweat from trying to soften the jarring blows of pounding over the "munnocks" or tussocks on the tundra.

Wolves! A black wolf was racing up the mountainside, and another one in the willows. That means caribou. Sure enough, right after the wolves took off we saw a herd go racing off scared from the wolves.

The connection on the sled that I was pulling fell off when we were going through the last rough section. I hadn't realized it until we stopped, so I had to turn around a go get it. Mike said he was going to head slowly up the mountain. I cruised back to the sled, turns out it wasn't too far, just as I was hitching back up I heard Mike take a shot. He got a caribou. He gutted that one out, and then we went up over to the other side. It seemed like there were herds of caribou everywhere! All around there were small herds, big herds, near herds, and far herds. We picked out a herd and went after them. We ended up getting stuck trying to go through willows to cut them off.

Pick a herd any herd! There was another larger bunch on top of the next mountain. We headed up that way, and split off to each side of the mountain when the herd split. I could not get close to take a quality shot. I chased one group off trying to get close, and the finally a group came from behind me and looped close enough to get a decent shot. I aimed and fired. I heard a hit but no animal flinched. I waited, getting ready to try again and looking through my scope saw an animal stumble a fall. I got one. I zoomed up to it and dropped the sled to go after that same bunch. I lost them, but Mike came over the rise and waved me his way. A big herd on top. We stopped a couple times to shoot, he dropped one but I missed. The herd split, and I went one way Mike the other.

 
Cow

I hit one and saw it go down, but it got back up and I lost track of it with the other animals. I tried to push them a little to see if one would fall back, nothing. While I was after that one Mike got one, and when he was heading back towards me got two more from a small herd in the willow. We stopped to reconvene. He said he was going to start gutting, and I had to go back and get my caribou and the sled. I picked up the sled and we headed down lower to try to get out of the wind while gutting the animals. Mike ended up with five and I got one. I think I need to practice shooting long range a little more.

 Temporary Meat Locker (just cracked the outside door a little)

We saw another big herd closer to town on our way back. I took a few shots before they got out of range, but I didn't get any more.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Girls Head to Anchorage

Image
The week before Easter, Anya had some appointments scheduled in Anchorage. Around that time gas went up to 15.99 in town. Yep. That's not a typo. $15.99/gallon. Gas is still $5.50/gal in Kotzebue, so we decided we could drive to Kotz and the girls would hop on the jet while the boys filled drums of gas and drove back to town. Our friend is a trooper in Kotzebue so we were able to stop in there to warm up and regroup. Brett went out to get gas and NONE of the pumps were working! It was such a bummer. He didn't even have enough gas to get home, but thankfully we have such kind generous friends that had some jerry jugs he used to fill the machines. Of course Oren ended up driving my machine back and was an absolute champ. It took us about 3 1/2 hours to get down there and about that for them to get home too. The Borough was working on making an ice road from Kotz to Noatak. We heard they didn't make it past this tricky spot and stopped to check it out. (The oper...
Read more

Uvlalautaq!

 "Good Morning."  Not really appropriate, considering its 800 pm, but its the only greeting I know :) Guess what I get to (have to) do this weekend?  REFEREE volleyball games!!!  Only here would I even be thought of for that.  In no way do I qualify, for I hardly know the rules!  Apparently, last year Timm, the volleyball coach, had to ref because no one else knew how to.  I guess better me than him... It's been around 10 degrees for the last week, but we still don't have snow!  The frost on the tundra sure looks like snow, but its just thick frost. With the time change, the sun is setting at about 5 now, so it's quite dark by the time I walk home. One of the girls in my class hurt her knee last week and was on crutches for a while.  Finally, today she came in without crutches, so I was talking with her about it and how excited I was to see her walking on her own.  She replied, "I sure pray last night for my knee to get better and I wake up this morning and w...
Read more

A new respect

I have a new respect for all officials.   I think that every coach should have to officiate a game, just to realize how difficult it is.  I had to referee volleyball games this weekend.  That's just one clue to how laid back everything is up here :)  The opposing coach was very loud and outspoken... she definitely made her complaints heard!  It did get a little bit easier with the more games that went on.   This was the only home weekend for the volleyball team, and on Friday the gym was packed.  Everyone was early, just waiting for the game to start.  Saturday was another story.  The games began at 12:30 and at 12:15 the gym was still EMPTY.  Everyone here really likes their sleep.  Community members and students trickled in through out the first match, but there was still only about 1/5 the number of fans as the day before.  They played two matches and a few more people came in for the 2nd.   Another funny story about being laid back:  with two minutes left of warm-ups, we still ...
Read more